As many as 30 players have confirmed participation in this 38th edition, including two AICF nominee entries: former champion Bhagyashree Thipsay of Mumbai and Pon N. Krithikha of Chennai, the reigning National junior girls' champion.

There will be six former champions in the fray: Bhagyashree, Aarthie Ramaswamy, Nisha Mohota, Swati Ghate, Tania and Soumya. They will be challenged by the young brigade, led by Padmini Rout.

The event has attracted nine WGMs, one International Master, three Woman International Masters and five Woman FIDE Masters, making it a fertile ground for completing FIDE title norms.

Tamil Nadu will miss many key players, including S. Vijayalakshmi.

Her younger sister, WGM S. Meenakshi, should be the host's best bet.

World Cup beckons

The winner of this event will qualify directly for the World Cup and this should motivate the players to give their best. The top prize will fetch Rs. 75,000 while the total prize fund is Rs. 2.5 lakh.

Chennai will be staging this event, which will run from October 29 to November 9, for the fifth time.

I'm glad to see that Dylan Loeb McClain will be coverage of the upcoming Women's World Chess Championship Match between GM Hou Yifan of China, current reigning Women's World Chess Champion, and GM Koneru Humpy of India, who is the second highest rated female chessplayer in the world.

Published: October 29, 2011

There is no obvious reason for such a disparity in a purely intellectual game.
One dubious explanation put forward over the years is that women are not as naturally aggressive as men and that successful chess requires frequent attacks. Yet in women-only events, a higher proportion of the games end in decisive finishes than they do at tournaments in which men participate.

That has held true in the current Women’s Grand Prix series. The third tournament, which ended earlier this month in Nalchik, Russia, was dominated by Zhao Xue of China, who won 9 of her first 10 games before finally losing in the last round to her countrywoman Ju Wenjun, who finished second. Zhao’s performance would have set a record if not for that loss.

(Hou Yifan, the women’s world champion, who won the first two Grand Prix tournaments, did not play in the third one because she was preparing to defend her title against Humpy Koneru of India. The match is scheduled to be played in Albania from Nov. 13 to Nov. 30. Coverage will be available at nytimes.com/pages/crosswords.)

In Nalchik, Zhao did not just win most of her games, she won them quickly and often with withering attacks. She got off to a quick start by beating Viktorija Cmilyte, who is from Lithuania and is the European women’s champion.

Cmilyte used a very passive opening, which got her into trouble. Instead of 3 ... Nc6, she should have played 3 ... d5. Then, 4 cd5 Nd5 5 e4 Nb6 would have led to a position in which Black would have been set up to counterattack White’s center.

Zhao’s 8 Nh3 was unusual, but it kept Cmilyte’s pieces bottled up by denying her use of the g4 square.

Though Cmilyte managed to dissolve Zhao’s center after 14 ... gf5, her pieces were still badly constrained. She erred with 22 ... Bh6, though even after 22 ... Nd8, her position would have been difficult.

Zhao’s repositioning of her bishop by 25 Bc1 won material. She could have played 26 Rd4; Cmilyte’s queen would have been trapped after 26 ... Qd4 27 Kh1 Bg7 28 Rd1 Qa1 29 Ba3. But 26 Qf2 was also quite effective.

Zhao wrapped things up with a nice attack. Cmilyte could not have played 42 ... cb3 because 43 Bg7 Rg7 44 Qd8 would have been mate. She resigned after 43 Bc3: she faced mate or a large loss of material after 43 ... Rf7.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 30, 2011, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Aggressive Strategy Pays Off at Women’s Grand Prix Event.

Spearheaded by defending champion and WGM Sowmya Swaminathan of Pune, the championship has attracted nine WGMs, one IM, three WIMs and five WFMs.

The event, to be played under an 11-round Swiss System, carries a prize fund of Rs 2,50,000 with the winner getting a handsome purse of Rs 75000.

In the first round matches played on Saturday, all the higher rated players had a smooth sailing, except for Orissa WGMs Padmini Rout and Kiran Monisha Mohanty, who were held to draws by Tamil Nadu youngsters J Saranya and A Akshaya respectively.

In the lone upset of the day, Andhra youngster Pratyusha Bodda outsmarted WGM and defending champion Swaminathan. At the end of the first round, as many as 13 players share the lead with one full point.

Sachdev, top seed in the event, faced veteran WGM Thipsay on the top table. She employed the Queens Gambit and opted for a sharp game by castling on the opposite wings.

With forceful play on the 13th move, she forced Thipsay on the backfoot and duly won a pawn. With Black struggling to get her counterplay going on the queenside, Sachdev cleverly blocked the play using her minor pieces and pawns and soon initiated a vicious attack on the Black king.

Sachdev won the game in fine style by sacrificing her Queen on the 32nd move, which forced instant resignation as it was leading to a checkmate.

Andhra player Pratyusha Bodda faced the Sicilian Scheveningen offered by Swaminathan. Pratyusha played the opening phase of the game in an extremely energetic fashion to force Swaminathan into making some concessions on her kingside.

Swaminathan was soon forced into the defensive early and she tried to exchange queens in a bid to slow down white's initiative. But Bodda continued in an exemplary way and took her initiative into the ending to earn a hard-fought win in 60 moves to register the biggest upset of the championship.

If I didn't already have more reasons than I can count on my 10 fingers to plan Trip No. 3 back to New York City, this news would be impetus enough! I do not agree with the propagandic tone of this article that appears to be saying all things great and wonderful are Islamic, but I do agree that the ancient artwork is precious, beautiful and priceless, expressing an esthetic that has been utterly lost to us.

In 2003 the Islamic galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed for renovation, and one of the world’s premier collections of Islamic art more or less vanished into storage.

The timing, barely two years after the events of Sept. 11, was unfortunate, if unavoidable. Just when we needed to learn everything we could about Islamic culture, a crucial teaching tool disappeared.

As of Tuesday the learning can go forward. The Met’s Islamic collection returns to view in what are now being called the galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.

The new, much expanded installation — organized by Sheila Canby, the curator in charge of the department of Islamic art, with Navina Najat Haidar as project coordinator — is as intelligent as it is visually resplendent. The art itself, some 1,200 works spanning more than 1,000 years, is beyond fabulous. An immense cultural vista — necessary, liberating, intoxicatingly pleasurable — has been restored to the city.

As its title implies, that vista has been carefully thought out and framed. Rather than presenting Islamic art as the product of a religiously driven monoculture encompassing centuries and continents, the Met is now — far more realistically — approaching it as a varied, changing, largely secular phenomenon, regionally rooted but absorptively cosmopolitan, affected by the intricacies and confusions of history, including the history that the art itself helped to create.

At the same time certain visual binders are evident. You see one — language — the instant you enter the first gallery. The written word is omnipresent. Whether in the form of love poems, proverbs or passages from Islam’s holy book, the Koran, calligraphy spreads like a fine net over everything, creating an art that almost literally speaks.

“Praise be to God, the King, the pure Truth,” declares a precious scrap of ninth-century silk in characters stitched in red thread. “Planning before work protects you from regret,” intones a big white 10th-century plate that, given the perfect placement of the inscription around its rim, seems to have heeded its own advice. And from a gloriously colored openwork jug — turquoise on top of cobalt blue, day on top of night — a voice as soft as a sigh shares a lover’s confidence: “One moment, while sitting face to face with her I tied my soul, like my heart, to the end of her curls.”

In the context of Islamic art, language is transferable to almost any surface, on almost any scale. And some insist that you can’t really know this art until you’ve experienced Islamic architecture: grand palaces like the Alhambra, tombs like the Taj Mahal or houses of worship like the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, all embroidered with inscriptions.

The Met galleries convey some sense of monumentality in a few long-familiar works. The great 11-foot-high mosaic-tiled 14th-century mihrab, or prayer niche, from a religious school in Isfahan is one. The intact wood-paneled reception hall known as the Damascus Room, decorated with poetic verses that have been placed in proper order with this reinstallation, is another.

Then there are carpets, portable monuments. The Met has spectacular examples. The Simonetti Carpet, woven around 1500 in Cairo and named for a 20th-century owner, is nearly 30 feet long. In dim quarters in the old Islamic galleries it was hard to appreciate. Now displayed in a high, wide room designed by Michael Batista, the Met’s exhibition design manager, and atmospherically lighted by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, its garden-and-lawn colors — rose reds, grass greens — look tender with fresh life.

Carpets like this one, emerging from imperial ateliers, are partly about look-at-me largeness. But they’re also about close-up detail, and this is the real story of the art of the Islamic world, and certainly of the examples gathered at the Met.

It is over all an art of intimacy; about one-on-one encounters with individual objects, more often than not quite small; and about the endlessly varied orchestration of a small number of visual motifs and mediums, and the minute felicities such variation generates. The alert eye will spot some of the motifs right away: besides the written word, there are images of stars, flowers, figures and abstract shapes, each migrating from one kind of object to another within a fixed repertory of mediums: textiles, ceramics, manuscripts, and so on.

Choose any motif or medium, and it will set you traveling. Images of animals will take you from a gnarled little camel-shaped bottle made with Roman glassmaking techniques in Syria in the seventh or eighth century, to a hefty lion-shaped bronze incense burner from 12th-century Iran, to a sculptural knot of predatory beasts — a dragon attacking a lion attacking a deer — perched on the hilt of a 16th-century Indian dagger.

A gallery of Ottoman Turkish art is a floral detonation, with blossoms imported from China, Persia, India and Europe streaming over textiles and landing on plates, helmets and the most beautiful prayer rug in the world. If glass is your passion, a lineup of mosque lamps, enameled and translucent, from Egypt and Syria will be heaven.

Metalwork connoisseurs will beat a path to a 13th-century brass brazier inlaid with impossibly refined silver and copper designs, and to an astrolabe that calculates your geographic coordinates, your horoscope and the precise times for daily prayer.

If your point of reference in art is the human form, you’ll find it — aggressive, ethereal and absurd — in manuscript paintings, the most famous being illustrations for the 16th-century edition of the “Shahnama,” or “Book of Kings,” produced under the art-obsessed and faith-obsessed Persian emperor Shah Tahmasp.

Written around A.D. 1000 as a chronicle of the pre-Islamic kings of Iran, the “Shahnama,” at least in painters’ hands, is history set in a Never Never Land of martial derring-do and mystical raptures. Heroes skewer demons in lavender landscapes; angels drop from gilded skies to help when things go awry. In the 16th-century edition’s very first painting, “The Ship of Shi’ism,” the Prophet Muhammad appears, his face veiled and wreathed in a halo of flames, as if to extend blessings over what will follow.

For more than four centuries those blessings held, but the book’s modern history has been a disaster. In 1959 the American collector Arthur A. Houghton Jr. bought the “Shahnama” with its original 258 paintings still miraculously intact. Then, committing what some scholars consider one of the notable art crimes of the 20th century, he took the book apart and began dispersing its pages; he gave 78 sheets to the Met and auctioned others. After his death in 1990 his estate tried to sell surviving pages of the book to the Iranian government but ended up exchanging them for an American painting that Iran owned but no longer wanted, Willem de Kooning’s “Women III” from 1952-53. A good deal? You can judge for yourself with a visit to the de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Met’s Islamic reinstallation, which includes (temporarily) a somewhat obsequious tribute to collectors past and present, is mum on all of this, as is the collection catalog, doubtless in part because Mr. Houghton was a long-time Met trustee. Also the story is old, and not so unusual. [Maybe, but he still sucks.]

Art has always reflected what’s wrong about people as much as what’s right about them. In image after image, beauty is countered by cruelty; utopianism by power grabs. Paradise gardens and battlefields make equally desirable real estate. Yet if treasured objects almost invariably come with ethical ambiguities, one thing is certain: Those objects do keep coming, as recent arrivals attest.

One, on loan to the Met from the Hispanic Society of America, is a tiny Hebrew bible written by a Sephardic scribe named Moshe b. Ya’akov Qalif. When he was working in Seville, in 1472, the once pervasive Muslim presence barely clung to life in Spain, yet the exquisite micrographic interlaces that adorn and shape his text are almost identical to those in Koranic illuminations.

And in the last of the new galleries, devoted to Islamic art in South Asia, comes a 2011 Met acquisition that’s a real surprise. It’s [an] album painting with a Hindu theme: the fierce goddess Bhairavi dancing up a spiritual storm in a cremation ground. The picture is thought to have been a collaboration between two 17th-century Mughal court painters, Payag and Abid, one Hindu, the other Muslim. It was probably commissioned by the Muslim emperor Shah Jahan as a gift to a friend, the Hindu ruler Rana Jagat Singh, who worshipped the goddess.

Here — and over and over again through 15 galleries and across more than a millennium — we’re reminded how fluid a concept Islamic art can be, and often is. If we could ask for only one lesson learned from the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, surely freedom from essentialist thinking would be the necessary one. That’s the direction the Met’s new galleries take us this fall. In the bargain they give us beauty, spring fresh and second to none.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Antique jewellery: The bracelets, engraved with serpents, could have been worn
by a wealthy Viking leader
(There are more photos in the article at The Daily Mail)

A metal detecting enthusiast unearthed 'the
find of a lifetime' when he discovered a Viking treasure hoard including 200
pieces of silver jewellery. Darren Webster dug up a 1,000-year-old casket
that also held coins, hacksilver and ingots while scouring at an undisclosed
location on the border between Cumbria and North Lancashire.

Experts at the British Museum in London say
the find is of 'national significance'. 'It's a find of a lifetime,' said Mr Webster,
from Carnforth, Cumbria. 'It's a long process having the find
assessed. Neither me or the landowner know what will
happen with it. There has been a lot of interest. I want everybody to know about
the find.

'I got a good signal on my detector so I dug
about 18 inches and then I saw a lead pot. It was slightly open. I could see all
the coins and jewellery inside. It was a great feeling.'

Bracelets elaborately engraved with serpents,
which could have been worn by a wealthy Viking leader, make up part of the
discovery along with rings and an impressive stash of coins.

The haul is now being studied by experts at
the British Museum who will reveal their findings in
December.

Brian Randall, chairman of the Lune Valley
Metal Detecting Club, said: 'We are all thrilled for Darren and wish it was
us. No one goes out looking for hoards but it's
very nice if you do find one.'

Sabine Skae, the curator of Barrow's Dock
Museum, said the new hoard will help put Cumbria and South Lakeland on the map
as having an important Viking heritage.

'Over the past ten years there has been an
increase in small finds and now some larger finds which is really forcing people
to look at Cumbria in a new way,' said Mrs Skae.

Oxford University anthropology lecturer,
Stephen Oppenheimer, said big hoards such as this paint a new picture of what
Vikings were doing in England.

The discovery of big hoards break down the
stereotype of Vikings just coming over here to raid our churches and take
valuables back to their own country.

'Burying large amounts like this indicates
they were settling here,' said Mr Oppenheimer.

Local archaeologist Steve Dickinson, of
Ulverston, said the hoard was 'extremely important nationally'. He said: 'Any hoard is always rare and
therefore of national importance but because of its size and detail this is
particularly exciting.'

A spokesman for the British Museum confirmed
that Darren's discovery was 'a significant Viking hoard'. He said: 'Research on the hoard is ongoing and
more information and images will be revealed at the time of the coroner's
inquest in mid-December.'

A spokesperson for Carlisle's Tullie House
Museum, where the hoard was originally taken, compared Mr Webster's find to that
of the Cuerdale Hoard found on the southern bank of a bend of the River Ribble
in 1840, the largest Viking silver hoard in north-western
Europe.

BAGHPAT, India (TrustLaw) - When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young bride years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives.

"My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village community center in Baghpat district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

"They took me whenever they wanted -- day or night. When I resisted, they beat me with anything at hand," said Munni, who had managed to leave her home after three months only on the pretext of visiting a doctor.

"Sometimes they threw me out and made me sleep outside or they poured kerosene over me and burned me."

Such cases are rarely reported to police because women in these communities are seldom allowed outside the home unaccompanied, and the crimes carry deep stigma for the victims. So there may be many more women like Munni in the mud-hut villages of the area.

Munni, who has three sons from her husband and his brothers, has not filed a police complaint either. Social workers say decades of aborting female babies in a deeply patriarchal culture has led to a decline in the population of women in some parts of India, like Baghpat, and in turn has resulted in rising incidents of rape, human trafficking and the emergence of "wife-sharing" amongst brothers.
Aid workers say the practice of female feticide has flourished among several communities across the country because of a traditional preference for sons, who are seen as old-age security.

"We have to take this as a warning sign and we have to do something about it or we'll have a situation where women will constantly be at risk of kidnap, rape and much, much worse."

SECRET PRACTICES

Just two hours drive from New Delhi, with its gleaming office towers and swanky malls, where girls clad in jeans ride motor bikes and women occupy senior positions in multi-nationals, the mud-and-brick villages of Baghpat appear a world apart.

Here, women veil themselves in the presence of men, are confined to the compounds of their houses as child bearers and home makers, and are forbidden from venturing out unaccompanied.

Village men farm the lush sugarcane plantations or sit idle on charpoys, or traditional rope beds, under the shade of trees in white cotton tunics, drinking tea, some smoking hookah pipes while lamenting the lack of brides for their sons and brothers.

The figures are telling.

According to India's 2011 census, there are only 858 women to every 1,000 men in Baghpat district, compared to the national sex ratio of 940.

Child sex ratios in Baghpat are even more skewed and on the decline with 837 girls in 2011 compared to 850 in 2001 -- a trend mirrored across districts in northern Indian states such as Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west.

"In every village, there are at least five or six bachelors who can't find a wife. In some, there are up to three or four unmarried men in one family. It's a serious problem," says Shri Chand, 75, a retired police constable.

"Everything is hush, hush. No one openly admits it, but we all know what is going on. Some families buy brides from other parts of the country, while others have one daughter-in-law living with many unwedded brothers."

Women from other regions such as the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal speak of how their poor families were paid sums of as little as 15,000 rupees ($300) by middle-men and brought here to wed into a different culture, language and way of life.

"It was hard at first, there was so much to learn and I didn't understand anything. I thought I was here to play," said Sabita Singh, 25, who was brought from a village in West Bengal at the age of 14 to marry her husband, 19 years her elder.

"I've got used to it," she says holding her third child in her lap. "I miss my freedom."

Such exploitation of women is illegal in India, but many of these crimes are gradually becoming acceptable among such close-knit communities because the victims are afraid to speak out and neighbors unwilling to interfere.

Some villagers say the practice of brothers sharing a wife has benefits, such as the avoidance of division of family land and other assets amongst heirs.

Others add the shortage of women has, in fact, freed some poor families with daughters from demands for substantial dowries by grooms' families.

Social activists say nothing positive can be derived from the increased exploitation of women, recounting cases in the area of young school girls being raped or abducted and auctioned off in public.

While India's overall female-to-male ratio marginally improved since the last census in 2001, fewer girls were born than boys and the number of girls under six years old plummeted for the fifth decade running.

A May study in the British medical journal Lancet found that up to 12 million Indian girls were aborted over the last three decades -- resulting in a skewed child sex ratio of 914 girls to every 1,000 boys in 2011 compared with 962 in 1981.

Sons, in traditionally male-dominated regions, are viewed as assets -- breadwinners who will take care of the family, continue the family name, and perform the last rites of the parents, an important ritual in many faiths.

Daughters are seen as a liability, for whom families have to pay substantial wedding dowries. Protecting their chastity is a major concern as instances of pre-marital sex are seen to bring shame and dishonor on families.

Women's rights activists say breaking down these deep-rooted, age-old beliefs is a major challenge. "The real solution is to empower girls and women in every way possible," says Neelam Singh, head of Vatsalya, an Indian NGO working on children's and women's issues.

"We need to provide them with access to education, healthcare and opportunities which will help them make decisions for themselves and stand up to those who seek to abuse or exploit them." (TrustLaw is a global news service on women's rights and good governance run by Thomson Reuters Foundation. For more information see www.trust.org/trustlaw)

Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character Copiale Cipher finally has been broken.

The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of an 18th-century secret society in Germany. The rituals detailed in the document indicate the society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the society were not eye doctors.

"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," said computer scientist Kevin Knight of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, part of the international team that finally cracked the cipher. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

To break the cipher, Knight and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden [two femmes working side by side with the Knight - wonder if they play chess...] tracked down the original manuscript, which was found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and now is in a private collection. They transcribed a machine-readable version of the text, using a computer program created by Knight to help quantify the co-occurrences of certain symbols and other patterns.

"When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer."

With the cipher, the codebreaking team began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. But because they had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

"It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight said.

After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were "nulls" intended to mislead the reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.
The team later tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter or groups of letters. Eventually, the first meaningful words of German emerged: "Ceremonies of Initiation," followed by "Secret Section."

Knight now is targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught. Knight also is applying his computer-assisted codebreaking software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of "Kryptos," an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.

But for Knight, the trickiest language puzzle of all is still everyday speech. A senior research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of the USC Information Sciences Institute, Knight is one of the world's leading experts on machine translation -- teaching computers to turn Chinese into English or Arabic into Korean.

"Translation remains a tough challenge for artificial intelligence," said Knight, whose translation software has been adopted by Apple and Intel, among other companies.

With researcher Sujith Ravi, who received a Ph.D. in computer science from USC in 2011, Knight has been approaching translation as a cryptographic problem, which could not only improve human language translation but also could be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and animal communication.

The National Science Foundation funded Knight's cryptography and translation research. The Copiale Cipher work was presented as part of an invited presentation at this year's meeting of The Association for Computational Linguistics.

Folks who have studied symbology (like author Dan Brown and his fictional counter-part, Dr. Robert Langdon) know that "V" stands for more than a science-fiction show that first appeared on network television back (1983-1985) or the more recent and inferior remake (2009 - 2011).

Not mine! My French Canadian paternal ancestor did not emmigrate to the United States until 1881; my Polish paternal ancestor did not arrive until 1847. Nope - this is Isis' family line through Odis/Otis Lee New, 25 Apr 1912, Honey Grove, Fannin, TX; d. 03 Dec. 1976, San Francisco County, CA.

Stupid idiot! No matter what side you come down on politically, there is no ROOM for this kind of behavior in the world of sports. End of story. Don't we already have enough people in the world who act like schmucks? Do we really need another Iranian schmuck to add to the horde?
From The New York Times
Iranian, Refusing to Play Israeli, Expelled From Chess Meet
By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN

October 26, 2011
PARIS — [Excerpted] One of Iran’s top grandmasters was expelled from an international chess tournament on Tuesday after he refused to play a match against an Israeli opponent, the director of the tournament said.
The Iranian, Ehsan Ghaem Maghami, was scheduled to play Ehud Shachar in the fourth round of the Corsica Masters, a pairing determined by computer.

The director, Léo Battesti, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Maghami had asked him to change the pairing, but was told that doing so would violate tournament rules. Mr. Maghami then failed to appear at the scheduled time to play Mr. Shachar.

Mr. Battesti said Mr. Maghami should have told him beforehand that he would object to playing an Israeli. Given that five of the 186 players in the tournament were Israelis, the likelihood that he would face one during the tournament’s nine rounds was “99 percent,” Mr. Battesti said. “I told him, you cannot involve your rules in my tournament,” he said.

Mr. Shachar said something like this had never happened to him before, though it had to other Israeli players he knew. Usually, someone who balks at a particular opponent forfeits one game, he said, but “in this case, the organizer took a stand.”

Iranians have refused to compete against Israelis in other international sporting events this year, including the world wrestling championships in Istanbul in September and the world swimming championships in Shanghai in July. [SCHMUCKS. FIDE SHOULD BAN THIS IRANIAN PLAYER FOR A YEAR FOR HIS BAD SPORTSMANSHIP. HEY, KIRSAN, SHOW SOME BALLS.]

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Last month I visted St. Louis, Missouri to attend a meeting of Chess Collectors International that coincided with the start of the Kings v. Queens Chess Tournament at the "St. Louis Chess Club" and the grand opening (right across the street from the chess club) of the World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum. I met many wonderful people! One of my favorites is Lynn Hamrick.

It's one of those coincidences that is no coincidence that just last night I finished viewing Part 2 of Lynn's great award-winning video Chess Kids - Where They Are Now. I had watched Part 1 a few evenings before, and became totally absorbed in the experiences of several children playing in various age brackets of the 1990 World Youth Chess Championships held in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin! The respective winners of the "Boys" and "Girls" Sections were:
Under 14:

1990 - Fond du Lac, USA - (July 14 - July 22) - Wisconsin's Marian College hosted the 5th World Youth Festival, which attracted 170 players from 44 nations. With federation officials and parental entourages, this number swelled to more than 300. It was the first time that the USA had hosted a chess event of this size and importance and the accommodation and conditions received high praise from the competitors. Judit Polgár celebrated victory on her fourteenth birthday (23 July), by taking the gold medal in the Boys U-14 event. This was the second occasion on which she had successfully competed in the Boys category. Her father, Laszlo Polgar, pointed out that Judit's last three 'world' competitions, including the Thessaloniki Olympiad, had resulted in a score of +26 =9 -0. Vasily Emelin of the USSR and Gabriel Schwartzman of Romania finished in silver and bronze medal places. Russia's Diana Darchia won the corresponding Girls' U-14 event from the USSR's Inna Gaponenko and Hungarian Monika Grabics. In the Boys U-12, Boris Avrukh outdistanced second placed John Viloria and third placed Peter Leko. Corina Peptan was triumphant in the Girls U-12, ahead of Monika Bobrowska and Nikoletta Lakos. In the Boys U-10, Nawrose Nur won by a good margin from the Romanian Alin Berescu and Adrien Leroy of France. Ecuador's Evelyn Moncayo took gold in the Girls U-10, while Claudia Bilciu of Romania and Jovanka Houska of England took silver and bronze, respectively. New In Chess Best Game awards were chaired by Arnold Denker and won by Judit Polgár, Yvonne Krawiec, Tal Shaked, Corina Peptan, Francisco Vallejo Pons and Claudia Bilciu. Polgar made it a clean sweep by winning an Under-14 Blitz tournament from Vasily Emelin and Ronan Har-Zvi of Israel.

Lynn is teaming up with the National Scholastic Chess Foundation in a fund-raiser for a very worthy cause, and a special screening of the new edition of Chess Kids will be held:

Chess Kids

A documentary by Lynn Hamrick

Please join Sunil Weeramantry and the National Scholastic Chess Foundation teachers at a special screening of this award-winning film followed by a question and answer session with director and producer Lynn Hamrick

Saturday, November 5
2 P.M.

at
The Picture House
175 Wolfs Lane
Pelham, New York

$20 per person for admission, small popcorn, and drink

Chess Kids follows the progress of a group of talented students at the 1990 World Youth Chess Championship in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and rejoins them as adults

“The most realistic portrayal of tournament chess I’ve seen”-Jack Peters of the Los Angeles Times

* * * * * * * * *

Reception with Lynn Hamrick to benefit the NSCF 4 to 5:30 PM – following the screening

Bear’s Den Rock has captured the attention of travelers in the northern Shenandoah Valley since colonial times and for thousands of years before by the indigenous people who hunted and fished in the region. Now, a local archaeologist believes that the prominent outcrop just south of Virginia’s Route 7 in Clarke County is a part of a larger 12,000 year old celestial calendar used by Native Americans to mark the changing of the seasons.

“Although archaeological sites have been discovered across the United States, there’s nothing like this above ground or this old in North America,” says Dr. Jack Hranicky about the site located just off Ebenezer Road. Hranicky, also known as “Dr. Jack” to friends and associates, is a Virginia Registered Professional Archaeologist (RPA) who has authored 32 books on North America’s prehistory and discovered at least half-a-dozen other Native American solstice sites.

“This preserved site has numerous properties that prove its use 12,000 years ago by Paleo-Indians and classifies it as a major ceremonial and calendar site on the Shenandoah River,” said Dr. Jack “I classify it as an ‘Horizon Observation Station’ which produced a Paleo-calendar for early Americans.”

The story behind the presumed celestial calendar’s recent discovery is, in many ways, as intriguing as its ancient origins.

According to Dr. Jack, 12,000 years ago Paleo-Indians traveled throughout the area known today as the Shenandoah Valley and Piedmont Plateau. Although the Piedmont area provided the early Americans with a nearly unlimited food supply, the first Americans still ventured north and west along the Shenandoah River into areas that include modern-day Clarke County.

“As the Paelo-Indians moved north along the river, Bear’s Den Rocks would have been a very prominent landmark for them,” says Dr. Jack. “They also would have been able to clearly see the site where we are standing right now.”

Dr. Jack is standing in the middle of several large, concentric stone rings – each ring inside a larger ring. The rings were discovered by Clarke County resident Chris White on property he purchased in 2000 located about two miles southwest of Bear’s Den on a lower bench of the Blue Ridge.

Not long after purchasing the property White began building a house on a beautiful rise overlooking his 20-acre parcel.

“When I would come to work on the house, often I would sit by the creek,” White recalled. “A quiet voice inside of me told me ‘This land is important.’”

Despite White’s good feelings about his property, he really had no idea that the land was anything more than just a beautiful spot in a bucolic setting. White’s understanding of just how special his property actually was began changing about two years ago.

Not long after White finished building his house he shifted his attention to longer term thoughts about whether his land could play a role as a Native American Church. For years, White said, he had dreamed of creating a retreat center where all types of people could come to meet and discuss issues that concern Native Americans. To complement his Oklevueha Native American Church of Virginia, White decided to establish the Sanctuary on the Trail, a faith-based neighborhood and community outreach-initiative where spiritual leaders across denominations could meet to create possibilities for communities, churches, and tribes on challenges and issues facing them in a modern world.

So, in 2010 White decided that a good first step toward implementing his Sanctuary on the Trail vision would be to construct on his property what, in Native American parlance, is known as a “medicine wheel.” White even had the perfect location picked for his medicine wheel; the beautiful glen just below his house next to Spout Run.

Medicine wheels, or sacred hoops, are constructed by laying stones in a particular pattern on the ground, often following the basic pattern of a stone center surrounded by an outer ring of stones with “spokes,”or lines of rocks radiating from the center. Originally, and still today, medicine wheels are constructed by certain indigenous peoples of North America for various reasons including astronomical, ritual, healing, and teaching purposes.

As White began clearing fallen trees and brush from his hoped-for medicine wheel site, something extraordinary began to unfold. As White removed debris, pre-existing circles of concentric rocks began to be revealed. As White continued to work, he soon noticed another circular rock pattern next to the first circle.

At first White didn’t know what to think. Could it be that the stone rings were nothing more than a natural anomaly created by some long forgotten rock slide or other random event? Yet certain features of the stone rings piqued White’s curiosity. For instance, why did it appear that larger stones were positioned at cardinal points within the ring? And why were there two rings positioned adjacent to each other?

White, who himself is of Native American heritage stemming from the Cherokee Nation, decided that a professional archaeologist might be able to give him a better idea of whether the rings had been formed naturally or were man-made.

White got in touch with Dr. Jack.

Like any scientist, Hranicky was skeptical at first, but was none-the-less intrigued by White’s find. After some preliminary investigation Dr. Jack decided that the site deserved additional archaeological investigation. With the assistance of Chris and Rene’ White, Hranicky conducted the first scientific excavation uncovering a small five by five foot area at the Spout Run Site that so far has produced jasper tools and other supporting artifacts dating back approximately 12,000 years before present.

“Finding jasper tools here is very important,” Hranicky said. “Jasper does not occur naturally in this area so its presence on this site is very important in establishing that Paleo-indians were once here.”

While the small pieces of jasper may be important from a science detective’s point of view, the more extraordinary feature from a layman’s perspective is that the ancient solstice calendar appears to still accurately mark the changing of the seasons today just as it must have done more than twelve millenia ago.

According to White and Hranicky, a person standing in the center of the stone rings is able to focus their line-of-sight with one of several large stone markers placed at precise positions in the ring’s outer-most perimeter. The stone perimeter points can then be aligned with prominent landmarks further from the circle – for example Bear’s Den Rocks nearly two miles away.

Based on the stone alignments, Hranicky says, a viewer standing in the middle of the circle will observe the Sun rise directly over Bear’s Den Rocks on the Summer Solstice – the Sun’s furthest apparent northern position. [See diagram, below, from article.]

Harnicky claims that a similar Winter Solstice alignment coincides between a stone pillar in the circle and another prominent geologic feature high above on the ridge. Not far from the stone ring is a pile of stones that Hranicky believes may have once served as an altar based on its alignment with other features of the site.

Although on a recent Autumn day Bear’s Den rocks are obscured by the thick leaves and trees, Dr. Jack says that when the stone ring and altar were built some 12,000 years ago there were no trees on the mountain thus giving the Paleo-indians a clear line of sight from the center of the circle to the stone altar and continuing further up the mountain to Bear’s Den Rocks.

According to Dr. Jack, the stone calendar site was probably built not only as a place to hold ceremonies and observe solar positions, but also as a location for jasper tool-making. However, the primary value to the ancient tribes surely would have been in its importance to their survival in predicting the changing seasons.

“The site investigation included mapping and exploring resources around the site and confirms that Paleo-indian priests carried out ceremonies here using the angle of the sun, concentric rings and a stone altar that stands about five-feet tall,” Hranicky said. Hranicky is in the process of registering the site as a state-recognized prehistoric site with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and as a National Historic Landmark with the U.S. Department of Interior.

Hranicky and the Whites have coined the name “Spout Run” for the prehistoric site after Spout Run stream that winds through the property before making its way further down the mountain and into the Shenandoah River.

Hranicky who believes that Clarke County’s Spout Run Site is the oldest above-ground Paleo-indian ceremonial site in North America, will be presenting his research on October 22 during the Annual Meeting of the West Virginia Archaeological Society in Charleston, West Virginia.

“This prehistoric site located in Northern Virginia is of unique national significance and offers a glimpse into a highly developed culture living in Virginia over 12,000 years ago,” Hranicky said. “The site has above-ground concentric rings, jasper tools, Summer/Fall focus and calendar using the summer solstice as a start for the year.

“Jasper is a cryptocrystalline stone in geology known to be a preferred mineral to fashion tools by Paleo-indians during the Younger Dryers period, which occurred after the Earth returned very quickly into near glacial cold, dry and windy conditions. Dating also corresponds to the length of time that the Paleo-indians mined for jasper at the Thunderbird (Flint Run) Paleo-indian Complex in Warren County” Hranicky remarked.

Thunderbird is a jasper quarry excavated in 1974 by Catholic University’s late William Gardner. Gardner was among the first to uncover evidence that Paleo-indians used the Shenandoah River to reach jasper quarries there.

“Our goal is to seek donations and funds to help preserve the site for future generations,” said Spout Run owner Chris White. “Anyone interested in helping preserve this sacred site can contact White at the Native American Church of Virginia."

Monday, October 24, 2011

I had no idea this was planned - but in any event, I was playing at the Hales Corners Chess Challenge XIV on Saturday 10/22. I'm sorry to have missed this, though. Damn! I earned my Bachelor's degree at UW-Milwaukee.

Last Saturday, the Archaeological Institute of America – Milwaukee Chapter
and UW-Milwaukee’s Archaeological Research Laboratory brought together UWM
professors, students, archaeologists and anthropology enthusiasts to an event in
celebration of the first-ever National Archaeology Day.

The event was titled “Life after Fieldwork: Behind the Scenes at
UW-Milwaukee’s Archaeology Lab” and provided an inside look into current
projects and the ways anthropologists and archaeologists study their findings
after the fieldwork is done.

UWM professors Dr. Patricia Richards and Dr. Laura Villamil were among some
of the speakers at the event. They discussed their projects and the importance
of archaeology in today’s society.

Former national AIA President and current AIA – Milwaukee Chapter President
Jane Waldbaum was the co-sponsor for the event.

Dr. Jane Waldbaum

“The Archaeological Institute of America is the oldest and largest nonprofit
archaeological organization in North America, founded in 1879 by a professor of
classics at Harvard,” Waldbaum said. “In those days, they wanted to sponsor digs
and basically bring knowledge, primarily of classic archaeology, to the
public.”

Waldbaum said over time, it grew into a national and international
organization. “It developed a network of local societies, which are like chapters. There
are 180 altogether now,” Waldbaum said.
Milwaukee is one of those chapters.

“Part of the mission of the National AIA is to bring knowledge of archaeology
to the general public in the United States,” Waldbaum said. “We are chartered by
Congress … there are other archeological organizations in the country, but we’re
the oldest … the largest and the only one that has this kind of systematic
public programming on a national scale and division of chapters.”

Waldbaum said they also have annual meetings that serve their more “scholarly
members” by giving presentations on their latest research.

She explained how National Archaeology Day came to be and how AIA became
involved. “The national [AIA] headquarters are in Boston, and someone came up with the
bright idea this year, as late as August, to declare October 22 as National
Archaeology Day,” Waldbaum said.

Though it was short notice, “a little bit of support and encouragement” was
given to see if some local chapters could host some events in October she
said.

“What they’re doing is showing some of the ways you deal with material after
it has been brought back to the lab to be tested,” Waldbaum said.

The event was meant to show people the less glamorous side of archaeology, in
stark contrast to the cherished fictional life of Dr. Jones of the Indiana Jones
franchise. “You think of archaeology [and people ask] ‘What’s the most important thing
you ever found, the most exciting thing you ever found … Is it really glamorous
to go to Egypt or Yucatan and find things?’” Waldbaum said. “Yes, all of those
are very exciting, but if you don’t then take that material and study it and
publish it, it’s wasted. You might as well be a looter.” [MIGHTY APPLAUSE FROM YOURS TRULY!!!!!]

She said archaeologists also have to run tests to discover who made the
object, why it was used, how it was used, if it was traded and how it was made.
In addition, many other questions must be answered before writing and publishing
scholarly material on the excavated findings, and this event was a way to shed
light on that.

Waldbaum believes the study of archaeology is important because it reveals to
us the exciting possibilities of “mere humans.” “We study the human past, and we’re interested in all facets of the human
past – it’s not dinosaurs – it’s the human past,” Waldbaum said. “I think most
of us feel that by knowing more about how our ancestors, even the most remote
ones, lived and went about their lives, we can extrapolate that to our own lives
and our societies … It’s really quite amazing.”

Dr. Patricia Richards

Dr. Patricia Richards is a UWM professor and archaeologist who focuses her
studies on the periods of history with written record. She spoke at the event
about her 1991 project, which included a collection of human bones from a
historical cemetery.

“This [exhibition] represents an archaeological collection that we have that
was excavated on the County Institution Grounds in 1991 and 1992, and we got the
collection returned to us for permanent curation in 2007,” Richards said.

“The goal of this particular project is to permanently curate the collection,
to stabilize it, appropriately boxing it … and then attempting to take the
spatial information – causes of death, various kinds of pathologies – comparing
it to a list of individual names, and we’re trying to eventually identify the
individuals,” Richards said.

Richards was in charge of mapping, artifact analysis, spatial analysis, wood
identification and all of the osteology.

Richards has worked on a variety of other historic cemeteries, even some
prehistoric cemeteries, but most recently, she excavated a 19th century cemetery
near 22nd Street between West Clybourn and West Michigan Streets in
Milwaukee. “For some reason, I just kind of ended up being the person who does historic
cemeteries around here … I don’t know why,” she said.

She too believes in the importance of archaeological studies, but understands
why people not related to the field have trouble seeing the relevance of the
work. “In the 19th century, academics and archaeological academics were sort of
part of the popular media … they were much more integrated in what was going on,
and people, I think, saw some kind of relevancy,” Richards said.

Richards talked about this group becoming irrelevant to the public, partly
because they had become so overly esoteric. Richards said anthropologists study humans in their entirety, as an
integrated entity. “If we understand all of the parts as they work together … as a whole, if we
can understand that, we’re going to understand a lot more about humans … and
their environments,” Richards said. “It’s pretty clear right now that we are
both messing up our environment, and our environment, in turn, is messing us up
as a species.”

She believes anthropology can help us recognize these patterns. “We’re able to look at various groups that have messed up their environments,
various groups that have messed up their relations with other people, and we
know what’s happened in those instances and that’s one of the things archaeology
really brings,” Richards said.

Richards said many people just tell her you can read about all of that in a
history book. However, she believes the stories they are telling, as
archaeologists, were never written about in books. “When people get written about in history, they’re male, they’re important,
they’re the Steve Jobs of the world,” Richards said. “They are not this
individual who died at 40 or 50 years of age, probably of some kind of accident
and is pretty much anonymous … We’re the people bringing that story to
life.”

Dr. Laura Villamil

Dr. Laura Villamil discussed how she got started in archaeology, the
experiences she’s had, the basic process behind leading an international dig and
the value archaeology provides to us as human beings.

“I got started in archaeology when I was working in the main Mayan Temple,”
Villamil said.
She was hired by the Mexican government to participate in what she described
as a “National Geographic-type” project where she found human remains that had
spears through their heads and even tombs.

Villamil said the most exciting part of the job is and has been the “thrill
of discovery … making sense of the whole.”

Villamil was at the event to speak about her current project in Yucatan.

She stood behind a table with various maps indicating the region she is
working in and explained that the goal of the project is to just “get a feel for
the region.” “I knew I wanted to work there because we knew nothing about it,” Villamil
added.

Villamil said the archaeologists go to the region and “literally knock on
doors” in these villages to ask the community members if they are aware of any
ruins. “We have a very strong relationship with local families,” Villamil said.

Once someone notifies them about ruins, the team then picks a site where test
excavations are done.
“All excavated material has to be stored in Mexico and most of the lab work
goes on when we’re there,” Villamil said.

Because of national and international regulation, excavated material cannot
be transported from Mexico to America. Everything must stay in the village.

Later on in the project, as Villamil continues to produce data, she will have
to submit a very detailed report to the Mexican government and later publish
scholarly materials on the findings. These projects, depending on the scope, can
take one to two years Villamil said.

Despite the length and intensive focus that surround these projects,
Villamil, Waldbaum and Richards all demonstrate a vigorous passion for bringing
awareness to the importance of the discipline.

“We think that our way of life is right, but it’s really just a blip of how
people live,” Villamil said. “Archaeology helps us in understanding that there
are other ways to live.”

The National Archaeological Institute of America will also be hosting the
third annual Milwaukee Archaeology Fair in partnership with the Milwaukee Public
Museum in March.

Visit www.archaeological.org/fieldwork to
learn about national and international archaeology projects through AIA and
opportunities to get involved on a dig as a volunteer.

Treasure hunters claim they have discovered two ships from Sir Francis Drake’s fleet off the coast of Panama and believe his coffin could lie on the seabed nearby.

His burial at sea in full armour and in a lead casket was designed to ensure that no one – but especially the Spanish – would find his body. Now, more than 400 years after Sir Francis Drake's death in the Caribbean, the great seafarer's watery grave may be close to being discovered.

A team of treasure hunters led by an American former basketball team owner claims to have discovered two ships from Drake's fleet lying on the seabed off the coast of Panama. The 195-ton Elizabeth and 50-ton Delight were scuttled shortly after the naval hero's death from dysentery, aged about 55, in 1596. It is thought that Drake's final resting place may be nearby.

Pat Croce, a former president of the Philadelphia 76ers and self-professed "pirate aficionado", embarked on a search for the ships after researching a book on the latter part of Drake's career, as a privateer plundering Spanish ships in the New World. Mr Croce, 56, described the discovery as "pretty wild", saying that after several days of searching in murky waters, the team suddenly got lucky.

“It’s been truly miraculous,” Mr Croce told The Daily Telegraph. “You set yourself impossible goals in life but to find these two ships has been amazing. “We are 98 per cent sure of their veracity. The charred wood, the lead on board, the English pottery from that period. And we’re confident no crew in its right mind would have deliberately sailed there.

Mr Croce said that based on multiple records from the time, including the journal of Thomas Maynard, a member of Drake’s entourage who sailed on the Defiance, the coffin was believed to be one league – or just over three miles – away from the wrecks.

Mr Croce described Drake as his “favourite pirate of all time”. “Here’s a fellow in the 16th century who sailed around the world and single-handedly wreaked havoc in the New World when navigation was still primitive,” he said. “Even Queen Elizabeth described him as her pirate. The British members of our crew have been very excited.”

Drake fell ill a few weeks after failing to conquer the port of Las Palmas. He died while anchored off the coast of Portobelo and his two badly damaged ships were scuttled to avoid them, or their contents, falling into Spanish hands. Mr Croce's team, which includes experts and explorers from Britain, France, Australia, Panama and Colombia, used what diving experts have described as the most sophisticated equipment in the world to scan the ocean floor.

After locating the two ships, they now hope to find Drake's body, which has long been the target of treasure hunters and historians. "It's truly a needle in a haystack, but so were the ships. We found them within a week. We just haven't found him, yet," said Mr Croce, the founder of the St Augustine Pirate and Treasure Museum. The Elizabeth and Delight were emptied and torched after Drake died, so no treasure has been recovered, Mr Croce said.

The ships will remain in the water because they are the property of Panama, he added.

Marine archaeologists were amazed at the find. "We've really, I feel, hit a home run here with what we found with Pat," said James Sinclair, a marine archaeologist. "Finding the Elizabeth and Delight near where Sir Francis Drake is buried is as exciting to me as helping discover the [Spanish treasure ship] Atocha and diving the RMS Titanic." He added: "Finding ship structures from that time period in this temperature water with the type of organisms that exist is a treasure in itself.

"We have an area that future students of underwater archaeology will be able to use for years to come."

Drake, one of the key figures of the Elizabethan court, is revered for his defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. One of Britain's greatest adventurers, he became only the second seafarer in history to circumnavigate the world between 1577 and 1580. [And yet records indicate the Chinese probably did this in 1430; they just don't get credit for it!]

Turkey, which has stepped up to the plate over the past several years to host a number of FIDE women's events (thank you, Turkey), will be the site (at Mardin, Turkey) of the upcoming 2011 Women's World Team Chess Championship, December 17 - 28, 2011.

There is already an official website up and running - excellent! I really like the chess graphic that was put together as part of the banner introducing the website - the conjunction of chess pieces with the female maze, with the timeless town in the background marching up the mountain! Turkey, of course, is the site of some of the oldest evidence of organized settlements in the world (Catahoyuk, for instance). The town in the background could be that place, coming to us out of the mists of time. I love it!

The teams that will be competing (I don't know the make-up of the individual teams yet) are from the Official Regulations:

Continental Champions: Algeria, Peru, Ukraine, Vietnam5 Qualifiers from Olympiad:Russia, China, Georgia, Cuba, United States of AmericaThe team representing the hosting Federation:TurkeyAre there issues with this event? You tell me. I was looking through the official regulations for prizes and compensation for the TEAMS. There was plenty written about what the officials would receive - and those who accompany them - as well as what the arbiters would receive - but only this about the TEAMS themselves:

4.5 Provision for teams 4.5.1 Travelling expenses shall be met by the individual Federations. 4.5.2 Expenses for accommodation and meals shall be met by the individual federations.• The quality of accommodation and meals shall match the standards and importance of the Championship.4.5.3 Prizes shall be provided by the administrator.
So, what ARE the prizes, exactly? The TEAMS are responsible for their own travel expenses, food and housing! What, exactly, are they PLAYING FOR MONEY WISE???? Inquiring minds want to know.

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"Advanced Chess" Leon 2002

About Me

I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...